UPDATED: Bettencourt says he predicted Emmett’s whopper donation

*Updated at 3:10 p.m. with response from Harris County Judge Ed Emmett

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett’s $90,000 donation to local GOP chairman candidate Paul Simpson, detailed in a story in today’s paper, apparently was no surprise to longtime party leader Paul Bettencourt.

Bettencourt, who is supporting 12-year Party Chairman Jared Woodfill for re-election, said in an e-mail Tuesday he anticipated Emmett would write a big check to Simpson, recalling a $100,000 donation that his current campaign treasurer, Mike Boylan, made to Emmett’s then-opponent, Charles Bacarisse, before the GOP primary in 2008. (See page 33 of Bacarisse’s February 2008 report).

“The result of that election was that Ed still won and Charles lost, and I urged Ed to remember that back in late January when I visited with him on the subject,” Bettencourt wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. “I thought Ed might write that size of check even back then as he was talking about it openly because, I believe, the last straw in his relationship with Chairman Woodfill was Jared’s lawsuit against Mayor Parker’s executive order allowing (city of Houston) same-sex benefits over the charter.”

Woodfill sued the city late last year after Parker announced it would begin offering health and life insurance benefits to the spouses of all legally married city employees, gay or straight, in alleged violation of a 2001 city charter amendment.

*Emmett said his falling out with Woodfill had “absolutely nothing” to do with him suing the city. His disillusionment with Woodfill, he said, occurred in 2012 when the party chairman took personal credit for creating so-called “victory centers,” an effort Emmett said was led by he and the state party.

“Bettencourt is selling a false story,” Emmett said. “Where they come up with this Annise Parker stuff… This is just weird politics.”

Emmett’s $90,000 donation, from his own campaign account, comes in the wake of the latest round of drama in the unusually divisive race for GOP chair.

This past weekend, Woodfill and his camp claimed that former Houston city councilman Bert Keller — a member of the Simpson-sympathetic C Club of Houston — had switched his endorsement to Woodfill, saying it was part of a larger trend of Simpson supporters jumping ship. (The oft-cited example of support switching has been David Jennings of Big Jolly Politics, who had supported Simpson).

Politico Gary Polland, one of the “big three” slate endorsers, who have all backed Woodfill, posted a recording on his website of a voicemail Keller left on Woodfill’s cell phone where Keller said to “list me as a supporter of Jared Woodfill,” and references an interview Simpson did with one of the other slates, Terry Lowery, that he describes as “very hypocritical.”

On Monday, Simpson sent out an e-mail blast with a statement from Keller “reaffirming” his endorsement.

“One thing Gary Polland and I can agree on is that Bert is a principled leader, and his statement this weekend confirmed where he stands,” Simpson wrote in the e-mail.

I reached out to Keller on Tuesday to ask him who exactly he was endorsing, and he confirmed that he still is backing Simpson. He described the voicemail as the result as stemming from a temporary fit of “Irish anger” he had after listening to a radio interview Simpson did with Lowery where the candidate condemned the pay-to-play slate endorsement system while also saying he had sought those endorsements. The slate endorsement system has faced much intraparty scrutiny lately.

“I thought there was some hypocrisy in it,” Keller told me. “That was a mistake based on my Irish anger or my overreaction.”

“I am going to vote for Paul,” he said.

Rice University political scientist Bob Stein said Wednesday that composition of early voters in the GOP primary, which is seeing higher-than-normal turnout, “suggests a broadening of the base”. That, he said, “might be evidence for the efficacy of Emmett’s strategy to defeat Woodfill’s relection i.e., bring out a more ‘moderate’ voter.”

“I have compiled the data through Monday and pattern seems to be one that favor Emmett’s strategy,” Stein wrote. “Nearly a third of those voting early did not vote in either the Republican senatorial primary (or) runoff in 2013.”

Some of the donations listed in the latest campaign finance reports indicate the fiscal-versus-social conservative divide at play in the race.

Emmett’s $90,000 contribution to Simpson, in addition to $10,731 he had already donated, has paid for radio ads in which he Simpson as a “trusted conservative Republican who has solid plans to grow and strengthen the party.”

“Paul Simpson will restore the grassroots and financial strength of the local party and that will benefit all Republican candidates in our November battle with the Democrats,” Emmett says in the ad.